The RPS Advent Calendar 2024, December 16th

Grapple with this door handle

Image credit: RPS

Today’s door has a big DO NOT ENTER sign, suggesting your immediate opening of it was in fact prohibited. Banned. Taboo, even. Yet it’s hard to see why, as it swings open to reveal a spectacular sunset view, interrupted only by the roar of a mechanical woolly mammoth.

It’s Horizon Forbidden West!

James: Structurally, Horizon Forbidden West adopts a fairly routine open-world setup, which I think sometimes gets lumped in with the kind of factory-produced map marker collectors one might associate with certain France-based publishing houses.

I also think that’s unfair nonsense. Top to bottom, HFW has been crafted with thoughtfulness and care, turning what might have been a passionless PlayStation cash-in into a masterclass in sequel-making. Take that open world itself. Besides being a gorgeous, handcrafted, vista-rich collage of biomes, distinct in feel as well as visuals, it makes a point to flesh out its people and places with meaty side missions. As often as these are punctuated by “Fight the robot dinosaur” objectives, the action is less about satisfying fetch quests and more about advancing character arcs or unravelling some new tangle of tribal intrigue.

Fighting the robot dinosaurs is also a pleasure in itself. Partly because of the beasts: I love the detail of their creaking carbon fibre muscles, or the constantly spinning chainsaw-teeth on some of the deadlier predators. Mainly though, it’s just because there’s something innately satisfying about peeling apart a futuristic mechasaurus with a bow and arrow. Forbidden West leans into this even further than Horizon Zero Dawn did, ramping up enemy aggression while adding a few new hyper-agile machines whose tricksiness encourages you to widen your toolkit.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/PlayStation

(There’s also a new grappling hook, which I remember finding sadly underused in the base game when I first played it on PS5 in 2022. However, the PC version’s inclusion of the Burning Shores DLC means you can add its expanded combat applications to your repertoire as soon as you get enough skill points. My favourite: a wonderfully gratifying grapple-into-jumping-spear-attack combo that instantly became my go-to finishing move for damaged machines.)

At a time when trust in AAA games has been badly frayed by undercooked games, predatory monetisation, and storytelling that’s either barely there or tediously heavy-handed, maybe more big-budget works should watch how Forbidden West does things. It’s expansive without spreading itself too thin, confident without losing its sense of wonder, and perhaps most impressively, knows exactly when to drop the heartfelt drama scenes and when to send you off to do more cool backflipping robot hunter shit. Not an easy balance to strike, I’d imagine.

Head back to the advent calendar to open another door!